Working Paper

What Crisis? Taking Stock of Management Researchers' Experiences with and Views of Scholarly Misconduct

Gary A. Hoover, Christian Hopp
CESifo, Munich, 2017

CESifo Working Paper No. 6611

This research presents the results of a survey regarding scientific misconduct elicited from a sample of 1,215 management researchers. We find that misconduct (research that was either fabricated or falsified) is not encountered often by reviewers nor editors. Yet, there is a strong prevalence of misrepresentations (method inadequacy, omission or withholding of contradictory results, dropping of unsupported hypotheses). Despite these findings, respondents put a fair deal of trust in the replicability and robustness of findings being published. A sizeable majority of editors and authors eschew open data policies but sees value in replication studies to ensure credibility in empirical research.

CESifo Category
Social Protection
Labour Markets
Keywords: scientific misconduct, data fabrication, data misrepresentation, ethics
JEL Classification: K300, A110